As you may or may not have noticed in the last few weeks, Wycombe Museum has a new and improved website.
This is just one of a number of projects that we have spent the last few months working on, thanks to funding that we were awarded by Arts Council England earlier this year. The funding was aimed at improving digital content for cultural organisations to help maintain a level of cultural engagement with communities throughout the difficulties presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wycombe Museum’s team have been working hard to ensure that we can continue to provide High Wycombe and the surrounding area with pathways to connect with our local history.
So, we’d like to take this opportunity both to say a huge thank you to Arts Council England, and to show you some of the things we’ve been working on.
1. This website!
Arts Council England provided us with the funding to work with a fantastic local web designer, DADD Design and Digital Development, to help us put together this site, and also provided us with the funding to have our staff work to produce all of the exciting new content to fill it with. This fantastic new website has given us a great new platform to hold a lot of new and exciting things we were able to put together with help from Arts Council England.
We’re going to be letting you know about some of our favourite parts below, but we do hope you’ll take the time to have a look around the rest of it. If you have any comments we’d love to hear them. You can send us an email at info@wycombemuseum.org to let us know what you think.
Some of our favourite bits are:
- Browsing some of the Highlights of our Collection
- Our new and improved Adopt an Object shop
- Lots and lots of great information about local history, furniture, our building and much more in our Frequently Asked Questions section
- New beautiful pages about Wycombe Museum as a wedding venue
2. Two new digital community exhibitions
You may have seen the exhibition we released earlier this year, Windows on Wycombe in Lockdown. We have also just this week released the second of our digital exhibitions put together by the Museum and our community, Me and My Chair. The time and resources it took to produce were also paid for by Arts Council England Funding. If you’ve not taken a look already, we’d love for you to do so.
3. Virtual talks
Through the November lockdown, we delivered a number of free talks on Zoom for the community to enjoy. They were all recorded, and can now be viewed for free. If you’d like to know more about our art collection, Wycombe Wanderers FC, the home of Wycombe Museum, plus much more, you can view these talks at your leisure.
4. Photo and video content
We’ve been able to produce 360 degree photo tours of the Museum site, plus videos showcasing our site for general and wedding uses.
5. Recruitment of new volunteers
 ACE also provided us with the funding to support staff to recruit new volunteers who will help to assist us with the future of our digital content, and keep up the momentum with providing great digital content for the community to enjoy. Keep your eyes peeled for new and exciting things to come!
6. A digital Wycombe cultural forum
We have recently been running a digital forum for around 20 local cultural activity providers to collaborate in Zoom meetings and share their opportunities, struggles and ideas.
But, that’s not all!
There’s more to come that we’re still working on. Here is what’s still in the pipeline:
1. A public online database of Wycombe Museum’s chair collection
We’re very excited to be working on the pilot of an online public database of all of the chairs in Wycombe Museum’s collection. This will be a great resource for researchers, chair enthusiasts, and just the generally curious alike – you’ll be able to search for chairs from certain makers and factories, chairs from certain time periods, and more. To begin with it will just be a representative cross-section of the kind of chairs we look after, with a view to over time expand the database to include our full chair collection.
2. Virtual interactive gallery tours
of our galleries, complete with family-friendly
3. A High Wycombe town website
This new website, produced in partnership with High Wycombe BidCo aims to be a one-stop shop to find about all things Wycombe – local businesses, events, social activities and more, all with an emphasis on local heritage, arts, and culture.
And so, once again we’d like to say a big thank you to Arts Council England, who have enabled us to work on all of this exciting new content, and for everything else that is still to come. We hope you’ll take a look around, and again, if you have any comments we’d love to hear them.
